Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence

PublishedDecember 14, 2009

Kevin Ryan

Careful investigation leads one to notice that a number of intriguing groups of people and organizations converged on the events of September 11th, 2001. An example is the group of men who were members of Cornell University’s Quill & Dagger society. This included Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Advisors Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley, Marsh & McLennan executive Stephen Friedman, and the founder of Kroll Associates, Jules Kroll. Another interconnected group of organizations is linked to these Cornell comrades, and is even more interesting in terms of its members being integral to the events of 9/11, and having benefited from those events.

After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (WTC), a company called Stratesec (or Securacom) was responsible for the overall integration of the new security system designed by Kroll Associates. Stratesec had a small board of directors that included retired Air Force General James Abrahamson, Marvin Bush (the brother of George W. Bush) and Wirt Walker III, a cousin of the Bush brothers. Other directors included Charles Archer, former Assistant Director in charge of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, and Yousef Saud Al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.[1]

Yousef Saud Al Sabah was also chairman of the Kuwait-American Corporation (KuwAm), which between 1993 and 1999 held a controlling share of Stratesec. The other owners of Stratesec were Walker and an entity controlled by Walker and Al Sabah, called Special Situation Investment Holdings (SSIH).[2] SSIH was said to form a group with KuwAm, and the group owned several other companies, including Commander Aircraft and Aviation General. In any case, the Kuwaiti royal family can be said to have benefited from 9/11 due to “The War on Terror” that removed Saddam Hussein from power. Of course, that was the second consecutive US war that Kuwait benefited from, the first being the 1991 Gulf War led by President George H.W. Bush.

Stratesec director James Abrahamson was President of Hughes Aircraft from 1989 to 1992, when Prescott Bush Jr. was helping Hughes lobby Bush’s brother, the US President, to lift sanctions on the Chinese government. Abrahamson became a director of Stratesec in December 1997.[3] He also co-founded a company called Crescent Investment Management (Crescent) with the Pakistani-American, Mansoor Ijaz. Crescent’s board of advisors included James Woolsey, the CIA Director for President Clinton who became a PNAC signatory and Booz Allen Hamilton executive.[4]

Mansoor Ijaz is the CEO of Crescent, and is a rare individual in that he claimed to have the ability to persuade several governments to extradite Osama bin Laden. After meetings with Clinton and his National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (who first introduced Woolsey to Clinton), Ijaz said that he could not convince them to work toward the extradition.[5] Additionally, Ijaz introduced the journalist Daniel Pearl, by way of a personal letter, to those in Pakistan who are believed to have been involved in his death.[6] Ijaz went on to become a Fox News correspondent, and he was a strong promoter of false claims leading up to the Iraq War, including WMDs and ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.[7]

Stratesec had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off on 9/11. Another client was Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where scientists were working on the development of nanothermite, a type of explosive material that has since been discovered in the WTC dust.[8,9]

The Carlyle Group

In 1998, Barry McDaniel came to Stratesec to become its Chief Operating Officer. McDaniel was therefore in charge of the security operation at the WTC in terms of what he called a “completion contract,” to provide services “up to the day the buildings fell down.”[10] McDaniel had previously worked for the United States Army Materiel Command (AMC), located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business “in an area the Navy called Black Projects,” or budgets that were kept secret.[11]

BDM has had an interesting history. In 1990 it was a subsidiary of Loral Corporation, a company owned by Bernard Schwartz that was related to WTC security company Ensec, and Ensec director Terry McAuliffe.[12] Loral sold BDM to The Carlyle Group in 1992, at which time Frank Carlucci became chairman of BDM. Carlucci was a covert operative in his early career, and got his start in national politics through his old college roommate, Donald Rumsfeld, becoming Rumsfeld’s assistant at the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969. Carlucci went on to be named Deputy Director of the CIA and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense.

During his first few years at Carlyle, Carlucci asked his friend Norman Augustine, later CEO of Lockheed Martin, if Carlyle could be included in a deal to buy the defense contractor LTV Corp.[13] That deal did not happen, but LTV was among the companies whose stocks were flagged for insider trading related to 9/11.[14,15] The FBI also briefly considered investigating Stratesec for insider trading related to 9/11, due to an SEC referral of suspicious accounts. But since the people involved were considered to not have any “ties to terrorism or other negative information,” an investigation into Stratesec was not pursued.[16] Putnam Investments, a subsidiary of WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, was one of Stratesec’s investors.

During the time that Stratesec executive McDaniel worked for them, the Caryle Group began to add some very powerful people to their leadership group. One such figure was James Baker, who went to Princeton with Rumsfeld and Carlucci, and who was White House Chief of Staff, and Secretary of the Treasury, for Reagan. Baker was also George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager and Secretary of State, and Bush’s White House Chief of Staff again in his last government position. Baker became a partner at Carlyle just two weeks after the February 1993 bombing of the WTC.

Earlier in his career, Baker had worked in President Ford’s department of Commerce, along with WTC impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys. And Baker was a longtime, close friend of Raymond Hill, an elite Texan who owned the mafia and CIA-connected Mainland Savings. American taxpayers shelled out approximately $500 million when Mainland failed in 1986. Investigators have since discovered that Mainland, like a number of other savings and loans that failed in the late 1980s, was a vehicle for CIA and mafia activities.[17]

Baker is also remembered as the one person most responsible for changing the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, in favor of George W. Bush. As Congressman John Conyers wrote: “Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to shut down the counting of votes in the 2000 Florida election.”[18]

On September 11, 2001, Baker was at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington DC, for the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group. Also present with Baker was Carlucci, “representatives of the bin Laden family,” and George H. W. Bush.[19] Carlyle had been doing business with the bin Laden family since the early 1990s.

Baker’s grandfather started the law firm Baker Botts, which had offices in Saudi Arabia and which, after 9/11, represented the Saudi Arabian government in a lawsuit filed by families of those killed and injured in the attacks. The Saudi connection is interesting considering that Carlyle owned, through BDM International, the Vinnell Corporation, a mercenary operation that had extensive contracts in the Middle East since 1975, training the Saudi Arabian National Guard and also training Turkish security forces.

Vinnell was considered “by some experts to be a CIA front.”[20] Of course Frank Carlucci was Deputy Director of the CIA, and George H.W. Bush, who was Baker’s boss for many years, was in the CIA for a majority of his career.[21] Perhaps as a result, in 1995 Vinnell was reported to be one of the first targets of al Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia.

BDM, Vinnell’s parent company, was sold to TRW in 1997. Directors at BDM at the time included Carlyle Group executives and a former assistant to Henry Kissinger, Philip Odeen, who went on to become the CEO of TRW. Directors at TRW at the same time included Robert M. Gates, former Director of Central Intelligence and current Secretary of Defense. Arden Bement, who was appointed by George W. Bush to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) one month after the 9/11 attacks, had left his position as TRW Vice President in 1992, moving to Purdue University in the interim.

In 1998, at the time that Barry McDaniel moved to Stratesec, TRW merged with Lockheed Martin, the company that sub-contracted the WTC security job to Ensec.[22] Stratesec and Ensec, along with E.J. Electric and Electronic Systems Associates, worked to build the security system that was in place at the WTC when the buildings were destroyed. All four of these companies had done significant work in Saudi Arabia before working at the WTC.[23]

Marvin Bush was a director of Stratesec from 1993 to 2000. It was during that time that Kroll and Stratesec planned and executed the extensive rebuilding of the security systems at the WTC complex. As his stint with Stratesec ended, Marvin Bush became a principal in the company HCC Insurance, one of the insurance carriers for the World Trade Center.

SAIC

Marvin Bush was the cofounder of Winston Partners in 1993, a company that benefited greatly from the War on Terror. In 2000, Winston Partners invested heavily in a defense contractor called AMSEC that was 55% owned by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). It has been noted that SAIC was not only a major contributor to the NIST WTC report, it was also a company that had expertise in nanothermites, explosive materials which were found in the WTC dust as mentioned earlier.[24]

Founded by a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, SAIC had a long history at the WTC, having evaluated the basement levels of the buildings as a potential terrorist target in 1986.[25] Interestingly, the company was hired to investigate the 1993 bombing of the WTC, an event that was “remarkably like the one which” they had foreseen in 1986.[26] In fact, SAIC later boasted that — “After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, our blast analyses produced tangible results that helped identify those responsible.”[27]

After 9/11, SAIC supplied the largest contingent of non-governmental investigators to the WTC investigation conducted NIST. At the same time, “SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them.”[28]

SAIC was also a pioneer in the intelligence contracting business, as a founding member of the Security Affairs Support Association in 1979, along with companies like TRW, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed and Hughes Aircraft. A special taskforce of the Defense Science Board, which was led in 1993 by BDM’s Philip Odeen, recommended a vast increase in the outsourcing of intelligence, which all these companies ended up benefiting from greatly.

Today a majority of government intelligence work is outsourced, and SAIC is known first and foremost as an intelligence contractor. SAIC sells expertise about weapons, about homeland security, about surveillance, about computer systems, about “information dominance” and “information warfare,” and has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. In fact, the company was paid huge sums to rebuild the NSA and FBI systems that supposedly failed before 9/11.[29]

SAIC is integral to the operations of all the major intelligence collection agencies, particularly the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA. In fact, the CIA relies on SAIC to spy in its own workforce.[30] But SAIC has also played an integral role in the “War on Terror”, and was even responsible for capturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was SAIC staff and technology that “tease[ed] out crucial clues about Mohammed’s activities from intercepted text messages that he sent to his al Qaeda operatives using as many as 20 different cell phones.”[31]

In an interesting coincidence, while the Carlyle/BDM subsidiary Vinnell Corp was training the Saudi Arabian National Guard, SAIC was training the Saudi Navy and bringing Saudi military personnel to company headquarters in San Diego for further study. Simultaneously, Booz Allen Hamilton was managing the Saudi Marine Corps and running the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College.[32] Vinnell now works with SAIC to train the Iraqi military.[33]

SAIC employees or board members have included Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former Deputy Director of CIA Bobby Ray Inman, former NYC OEM director Jerome Hauer, anthrax attack suspect Stephen Hatfill, former CIA Director John Deutch, and Lawrence B. Prior, a military intelligence officer and former TRW executive. Also formerly with SAIC, during the time of the planning and implementation of the 9/11 attacks, was Dick Cheney’s undersecretary of defense, Duane Andrews.

Duane Andrews considered Dick Cheney to be his personal, lifelong hero.[34] While he worked for Cheney, Andrews supervised Stephen Cambone, who went on to become Donald Rumsfeld’s “special assistant.” When Andrews left the Pentagon in 1993, he became chief operating officer for SAIC, where he supervised “much of the company’s work on secret projects with defense and national security agencies.”[35] Andrews and Cambone both later hired on to the British intelligence firm Qinetiq, along with George Tenet. Coincidentally, The Carlyle Group was a major shareholder in Qinetiq as of February 2003.

Halliburton and BCCI

When we examine who had the greatest motive for the attacks of 9/11, we need to look at who most benefited from those events. Certainly SAIC and other companies like Maurice Greenberg’s American International Group (AIG) are among those who profited the most after 9/11. But The Carlyle Group and oil companies like Halliburton led the field in terms of profiting from 9/11.

Dick Cheney was hired as CEO of Halliburton in 1995, despite having no practical business leadership experience. He quickly went on to add new directors that shared his political convictions, including Lawrence Eagleburger, the former Secretary of State under the first President George Bush. Eagleburger also served as a director of Kissinger Associates, and on the board of Dresser Industries, where George H.W. Bush got his start. Others Cheney added to his team included Ray Hunt, of Dallas-based Hunt Oil, a longtime supporter of the Bush clan.

Cheney named Charles DiBona as one of his first appointees to the board of Halliburton. DiBona had been the Deputy Director of the White House Policy Office and Special Assistant to President Nixon in the early 1970s. DiBona was also an associate of WTC south tower impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys, at the Logistics Management Institute, and DiBona and Kasputys had previously worked together during the Arab Oil Embargo as representatives of the emerging US Department of Energy (DOE). In fact, DiBona was one of the first US “Energy Czars.”

Like DiBona, Joseph Kasputys was in the US Navy for 20 years, and both of them retired as Commanders. They then both worked for the predecessor agencies of the DOE, and Kasputys worked for the Department of Defense as well. In 1975, Kasputys was appointed by President Ford to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce. As stated in the review of tenants in the towers, Kasptuys went on to run a large corporation called Primark that had offices in both towers on 9/11. One of the subsidiaries of Primark, The Analytical Sciences Corporation (TASC), worked with “so-called ‘black’ or top secret programs.” TASC also worked closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.[36]

After his government service, DiBona went on to lead the American Petroleum Institute, the petroleum industry’s national trade association, in a position he held for nineteen years. During that time, DiBona was also a director of First American Bancshares, the American bank secretly owned by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists in the late 1980s and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network, from which several alleged 9/11 conspirators came, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported, relative to BCCI, that — “You can’t draw a line separating the bank’s black operatives and Pakistan’s intelligence services.”[37]

BCCI was also clearly connected to the mafia. Munther Bilbeisi, a notorious BCCI representative who was finally indicted for tax fraud in 1991, was associated with several mafia families in New Jersey, including the DeCavalcante and Luchese crime families.[38]

More importantly, there were indications that the CIA was involved in the founding of BCCI.[39] There were also connections between George H. W. Bush, who was CIA director during BCCI’s heyday, and George W. Bush, through Harken Energy. But other US government representatives helped BCCI too, simply by not doing anything or allowing BCCI to make acquisitions in the US when they should have closed the operation down. For example, at the time that BCCI was first publicly suspected of wrongdoing, in 1988, both the US Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) were hesitant to investigate or prosecute, despite the fact that there were signs that both of these organizations already knew of BCCI’s fraud. When the Fed finally did take its first disciplinary action, it appeared that BCCI had a friend at the top, in that one member abstained from a critical vote. That member was the chairman, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan later explained that he had socialized with BCCI attorney and First American Bancshares President, Robert Altman.[40]

Kissinger and his associates

Henry Kissinger and his associates were also connected to BCCI in several ways, although he refused to share documents with the related Senate investigation. For example,

Henry Kissinger

Sergio Correa da Costa, who served as Brazil’s Ambassador to the US in the mid-1980s (note that Ensec was a Brazilian company), worked for Kissinger’s consulting company, Kissinger Associates, and was also a nominee shareholder for BCCI. And as early as 1971, Kissinger was linked to BCCI through the Pakistanis that arranged for his first visit to China.[41] At the time, Pakistrani agents who later became BCCI representatives were involved in fooling journalists into thinking Kissinger was in Pakistan instead of China. Kissinger returned to China many times and on occasion took very close friends and business associates along with him, most notably Maurice Greenberg of AIG, who traveled extensively with Kissinger.[42]

From 1985 to 1990, a client of Kissinger Associates, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) provided $4 billion in unreported loans to Saddam Hussein and his government in Iraq. Henry Kissinger was on the International Advisory Board of BNL during that same time period. Kissinger and his leading assistants Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger were investigated in this matter by the House Banking Committee just as the first Gulf War was ending.[43]

But the numerous connections between assistants and associates of Kissinger, and the most significant events of 9/11, are astounding. To begin with, Kissinger, who is considered by some to be an international terrorist due to his bombing of Cambodia, his role in the 1973 coup in Chile, and other atrocities, was the Bush Administration’s first choice to lead the 9/11 Commission. Although he later resigned from the Commission to avoid exposing his client list, Kissinger’s closest friends and aides played significant roles with regard to 9/11.

L. Paul Bremer, the managing director at Kissinger Associates from 1989 to 2000, left there to take a job with WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, and then played a leading role in establishing the official myth of 9/11.

Peter Rodman, PNAC member and Assistant Secretary of Defense on 9/11, hosted meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed the week before 9/11, and had previously been a Special Assistant to Kissinger for eight years.[44]

Joseph Kasputys, south tower impact zone tenant, worked with Kissinger in the Ford Administration (along with Cheney, Greenspan, DiBona, and Rumsfeld).[45]

Kissinger is also closely associated with several 9/11 Commissioners, including his long-time National Security Council assistant John Lehman, and his fellow Hollinger board member James R. Thompson.

And Phillip Odeen of BDM, who was Barry McDaniel’s boss until McDaniel left to lead WTC security company Stratesec, was a Kissinger assistant for several years.

There was also Renato Ruggiero of Kissinger Associates. Mr. Ruggiero was present on 9/11 in the sense that he was on the International Advisory Board for Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), the company that occupied all but ten of the 47 floors in WTC building 7.[46] SSB even shared the all-important 23rd floor with the New York City OEM. More striking is the fact that Donald Rumsfeld was the chairman of that SSB board, and Dick Cheney was a board member as well. Rumsfeld served as chairman of the SSB International Advisory Board since its inception in 1999, but had to resign in 2001 when he was confirmed as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and Cheney resigned at the same time when he became Vice President.

Another interesting coincidence is that Global Crossing was brought public in 1998 by SSB. Global Crossing was the company that Ensec director McAuliffe made a fortune on, when he purchased $100,000 in stock before the company went public and cashed out several years later for $18 million. Richard Perle was a lobbyist for Global Crossing.

On 9/11/01, Salomon Smith Barney’s parent company was Citigroup. Citicorp was the nation’s largest bank in 1990, but dropped half of its value from the summer to the winter of that year due to the S&L scandal. The company was saved by Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia, who pumped an initial $590 MM into the company in a deal brokered by The Carlyle Group. It is believed that the money, and more, came from BCCI as it was dissolving.[47]

Therefore, when Salomon Smith Barney was taken over by Citigroup in 1998, it was taken over in part by Saudi owners who were apparently redistributing the funding and networks of BCCI. Rumsfeld and Cheney entered the picture less than a year later, in May 1999. Jules Kroll, the founder of the WTC security design firm, and Rudy Giuliani, who was a former Department of Justice official, were responsible for investigating organized crime and BCCI, and were well aware of the extent of those networks ten years prior to that. Others like them, who brought the late indictments against BCCI, were leaders of the US Department of Justice.

Stratesec was at the WTC, and therefore, through Barry McDaniel and the Bush family, the influence of The Carlyle Group was present as well. In a sense, Rumsfeld and Cheney were also present at the WTC, because both of them were on the advisory board of Salomon Smith Barney. And SAIC was at the WTC on 9/11 too, as it was one of the first companies to show up at Ground Zero on that day. That fact will be discussed in the third installment of the essay series entitled Demolition Access to the WTC.

As for Kissinger, within hours of the events of 9/11 he was writing an opinion piece for the Washington Post. In it, he claimed to have thorough knowledge of what would be required to pull off such a coordinated set of attacks. Kissinger went on to inform the American public of what must happen next: “the destruction of the system that is responsible.”[48] No one can argue with that sentiment. But to this day, no one can accurately describe the terrorist system that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, let alone destroy it.

What we can say today, with certainty, is that if we are to believe that al Qaeda orchestrated the events of 9/11 then we do not know much about al Qaeda. Alternatively, there was a far more powerful and highly connected system of intelligence and financial networks, represented by organizations like Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton, that converged upon the events of 9/11. That other system continues to profit from the 9/11 attacks, and uses the fear and rage generated by al Qaeda-attributed terrorism to its own advantage. Understanding and destroying terrorism might simply be a matter of understanding and destroying the organizations that continue to profit from 9/11.

You can read the previous article in this series here. and the final article here.